


Tragedy for Two

by nikola



Category: Gintama
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 20:19:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18880513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikola/pseuds/nikola
Summary: Modern AU.Katsura is a cop. Shinsuke is a criminal mastermind.“What’s your obsession with Shinsuke?” she asks.“Obsession?” he tries to frown, but miscalculates, and it comes out as a shivering laugh. It’s really cold in the car. “I wouldn’t say I have an—I mean, I’m just doing my job.”“For seven years?”“Not a very good job, obviously.”





	Tragedy for Two

Elizabeth calls him Shinsuke now, too. Takasugi. Shinsuke. She says she’s been reading up on him, him and Katsura together. Side-by-side.

“Yeah?” Katsura says, looking down at his feet. The sidewalk is carpeted with burning, crackling leaves. Autumn is loud in this town: red, orange, yellow, a dying shade of brown. “And what’s your conclusion, officer?”

Elizabeth is silent. Distrustful, maybe. They crackle on in silence for a while. They are almost at the car when Elizabeth kicks away a crumpled cigarette butt and says, “What are you not telling me, Katsura?”

Gray sky falls in chunks between them, cutting cold. Katsura unlocks the car and they get in. The seats are chilly and not at all comforting. Elizabeth turns to him as soon as the door shuts, shifting her whole body and fixing her pale face on his. Intense; efficient; eager. Katsura looks away.

 “What’s your obsession with Shinsuke?” she asks.

 “Obsession?” he tries to frown, but miscalculates, and it comes out as a shivering laugh. It’s really cold in the car. “I wouldn’t say I have an—I mean, I’m just doing my job.”

 “For seven years?”

 “Not a very good job, obviously.”

 Elizabeth doesn’t laugh. Maybe it sounded funnier in his head? “I know there’s something else going on,” she says instead, “I’m a professional too, you know? I mean, it’s my job too.”

 Katsura might have said something to that, but something hits the side of the car and he startles. It’s nothing—it’s only the wind. Elizabeth hasn’t even flinched.

 There is a tree there, right in front of the windshield, uncomfortably close. Its thick branches are almost reaching into the glass. Who did the stellar job parking the car here? It’s just odd, that’s all. That Shinsuke should show up here, after all these years. (Seven, Elizabeth said.) The town hasn’t changed at all. Clamorous autumn, followed by dead-mute winter, a feeble spring. He’s never liked it here. He got out as soon as he could and never came back. Neither had Shinsuke—well, until now.

 The radio quivers into life and saves him from Elizabeth’s intense silence. Kimura wants to know where Katsura wants them, and whether he and Elizabeth would like a coffee or sandwich or something. Katsura tells him the street and house number and says thank you, but no thank you, unless Elizabeth—but she shakes her head. “Sure, boss,” Kimura crackles, and the radio disconnects.

 He is allowed exactly three seconds of silence before Elizabeth is onto him again. “That house. Number 17. That was the site of the first murder.”

 Let me catch my breath, Katsura thinks. Loud yellow leaves like disconnected wrists, scratching and palming the windows—it’s the wind again. God, isn’t that tree just too close? he should—“That’s where I used to live,” he hears himself say.

 Elizabeth holds her breath. He can actually hear her inhale, then hold it.

“He was my father.” He blames it on the tree, mostly, and also a little bit on Shinsuke for showing up here after seven years. Like he’s been counting his crimes like cards, piling them up until they were high enough to topple, finally, back onto where it started. Anyway, he hadn’t meant to tell Elizabeth at all and now her eyes are all aglow like she understands—

 “Shinsuke killed your father?”

 “Stepfather.”

 Elizabeth stares at her own nails, contemplative. Katsura thinks she’s going to bring up ethics and such, being a professional, something like that. But all she says is, “Why?”

 “Why?”

 “Why did he do it? Who was he to you?”

 “Nobody,” he says, automatically, like he’s been answering this question all his life. “I don’t know, Elizabeth. You’re the profiler.”

 “Shinsuke killed your stepfather,” Elizabeth says it again, unnecessarily. “His first crime. And then going on to become a criminal mastermind…” Katsura can see her working something out in her head, her arms crossed in front of her chest and her brows furrowed. “What was he like as a boy?” she asks, turning back on him. “That’s what’s been bugging me. He doesn’t fit the profile of a criminal psychopath.”

 “Of course he doesn’t,” Katsura says. “He was a troubled boy, but not a—not a psychopath.” Nothing so concrete as that.

 “Troubled boy?” Elizabeth scoffs. “That’s it? Come on, Katsura-san. You’ve been chasing this guy for seven years.” Elizabeth really likes reminding him of that, Katsura notices.

 “I didn’t really know him that well, personally,” he admits. “Also, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’ve got some personal grudge—I mean he—I mean my father—”

 Kimura comes back online.

 “Hey, boss. I think we have a problem.”

-

 The house is empty, and looks like it’s been empty for years. The floorboards creak and cobwebs glisten white like dust, dust black like shadows, an empire of rats and cockroaches and him, the ghost with an open throat. He stares at Shinsuke for a while and goes away. Can’t speak with his throat open like that, which is good because he had such a nasty voice. He shouldn’t have come here. He knows that; he knew that before the thought even crossed his mind.

 There are cars out on the street, watching this place. That must be Zura trying to be smart. Katsura, supposedly a brilliant and competent officer otherwise. When was the last time he’d seen him face-to-face? Must have been overseas. Yes, he remembers it now, the European castle. And what a pretty, gothic place that was. Almost as pretty as this house here. Perfect props, perfect lighting, perfect lines—what was it that he’d said? something about justice; crime, law, duty, then finally he said, Shinsuke, I’ll really shoot. Now that was funny. So he’d laughed.

-

Turns out Kimura was right, and then some. A problem becomes two, three, until everything goes to hell. A missing car, broken radios, cracked headlights, howling wind, a civilian or two yelling, some kind of fire, shadows moving, I swear, officer, I just saw it—and it’s always like this with Shinsuke. He seems so careless, like he’s just waiting to be caught, but when you try actually to catch him it’s a different matter. He is so smart with an IQ of a crazy professor. It’s a pity he didn’t do anything with it, really, Katsura could cry. If there was not a gun in front of his face he might have. Kimura was yelling, until the radio cut off, and Elizabeth was dashing, and Katsura was following, until he was not. The despicable laughing trees must have tripped his feet. The last thing he remembers is some red lights, confusing and bright, a phone call, and now there is a gun in front of his face. Shinsuke looks like he’s really thinking about it this time.

 Katsura thinks he should keep his mouth shut, in case Shinsuke is still undecided. He doesn’t want to bias him in any way, you know? But then of course, about three seconds later, he has to open his stupid mouth and say, “Are you going to kill me?”

 And Shinsuke looks like he’s really thinking about it this time.

 “This is strange,” Shinsuke finally says, lengthening his syllables until they are one, long, melodious _this-is-strange_.

 “What—which part? I mean, I’m just asking.”

 “You and me,” Shinsuke says. The end-of-the-road clearing they are standing is heaped with odors, layered human flesh of dirty rags, rotting meats. The cutting wind dilutes that a little but not very much. A flickering streetlight fizzles like blowflies, those greenish shiny things that buzz against glass windows with their eyes wide open. Katsura has to agree then, it _is_ a little strange. With the light gloomily watching between them, can’t remember if there was a place like this seven years ago, in this town, which he’d always thought so small and suffocating. But Shinsuke was not talking about that. “Why are we standing here, all alone?” he says.

 “What do you mean?”

 “It’s like a scene from a play.”

 Is Shinsuke thinking that he’s been set up somehow? A clever trap, with Katsura as bait? That would’ve been nice, Katsura thinks. That would’ve been something. Katsura clears his throat, thinking he might as well be honest, when Shinsuke adds, “You and me. In a play.”

 Katsura forgets what he was going to say. Elizabeth’s question is in his head. _Who was he to you?_ He frowns. Who was Shinsuke? Shinsuke was a scary boy. They used to be in the same class.

 He always wore his jet-black hair a little messy and his shirts untucked. Expensive shirts and expensive shoes. Not that Katsura could tell, but that was what the girls told him.

 A special kind of unapproachableness about him. A troubled boy, he’d said to Elizabeth, but he was so different from all the other troubled boys at school (and there was quite a lot). They went in groups, Shinsuke did not. They flunked tests. Shinsuke got every question right, then got flunked anyway because he’d missed too many classes. They bullied, Shinsuke disappeared. Nobody ever saw him eat anything during lunchtimes. He made it look, with his crooked eyes, like eating was such a mundane, human thing to do. Some kids tried calling him the Devil. But that didn’t stick, because as a principle the Devil should be more interested in people, try to ruin or corrupt or whatever. And Shinsuke, he was just not.

 Nobody even heard his voice very much. He was never seen threatening anybody or getting involved in big fights, which some kids went for at the time. The only time he was seen talking was when he was talking to that boy—that friend of his. The thing was, even though he was alone most of the time and didn’t talk much and disappeared when you weren’t looking, Shinsuke still had a friend.

That was the odd thing.

 Katsura remembers watching them talking and thinking—but anyway, Katsura himself at the time had a lot more pressing matters to think about than Shinsuke’s social situation, what with his stepfather getting drunk and his mother before she ran away and his schoolwork which was his only hope and his teachers who pitied him—he just did not have the time.

 And then for the next ten years, working through college and the academy and the force and thinking about what strange creature Shinsuke has become, it seems to him that he has never actually had the time to stop and catch his breath. And now, Shinsuke’s gun in front of his face. The peeled paint of the opposite wall tattering with the wind. Now he has a moment to think about it—everything. Shinsuke is waiting for him to say something. Katsura says the first thing that comes to his mind.

 “What happened to your friend anyway?”

 “What?” Shinsuke frowns.

 “You know, that friend—that boy. What was his name? Your only friend.”

 Shinsuke opens his mouth, eyes grown a little wide. “How—”

 Katsura doesn’t wait for the rest of his sentence. He’s seen, as soon as he spoke, that he’s hit something with this. Shinsuke’s steady arm loosens for a second, looks away for a shorter second, and Katsura takes this chance to run. He pushes off so hard with the first step that his whole right foot rings with an icy, shaking pain. He hears Shinsuke following, expects a hole in the back of his head but all he hears is his own devouring heartbeats and the gasping hot breaths in his ears. Walls come at him and pink yellow blue neon lights blink at him blurrily and large half-soaked leaves and torn newspapers spasm once, under his feet, then twice, under Shinsuke’s. Following him. A vibration, he thrusts his hand inside his pocket and swipes his thumb against the screen of his cellphone, a little damp, hoping it is Elizabeth calling him. He keeps running.

 He collides into a tree that appears suddenly in front of him. Almost. He saves his face by sacrificing the skin of his palm, now bleeding, wet with a creepy, misty sort of rain that began god knows when. Immediately turns around, and Shinsuke’s face is a little more visible here under multiple streetlights, a little bluish-green for some reason. They are both breathing hard. Katsura more than Shinsuke. They stare at each other for a moment or two in silence. Katsura feels like his phone inside his coat pocket is a heavy, burning meteor-like thing. He hopes Elizabeth got the message and is sending backup.

 

 Shinsuke opens his mouth finally, to say something.

-

But Katsura sees it first. Behind him. Behind Shinsuke’s back. His face startles Shinsuke, it seems, and he whips around to look back at what Katsura is staring at. Katsura can’t even think to run, couldn’t have if he wanted to. Slowly he raises his head and looks around where they are standing.

“Oh,” he says. Or thinks it, he doesn’t know. Anyway, Shinsuke looks back at him.

“What are you staring at?” he sounds peevish, irritated, like he can’t stand the secret.

“The—” the open-throat man. Walking, sort of walking that is, towards him. Katsura blinks to make him gone. Shinsuke, now unsure, looks back again. The street where he used to live is empty except for the lights floating upwards from small puddles, convulsing with raindrops, except for him and Shinsuke, and the open-throat man. His father. He wonders if he’s mad or if this is what happens to everyone. Maybe it is death, wearing a dead man’s face. Come to take him. It occurs to him to wonder—doesn’t know why he hadn’t before. Why? But here is Shinsuke, looking at him, so he asks.

“Why did you do it?”

“What?”

“Why did you kill, why did you—why kill my father?”

But he knows it is a mistake as soon as he speaks, and by the stuttering end he knows that he’s done something irrevocably, unthinkably awful.

That question is not to be asked.

Shinsuke’s gun is nowhere to be seen, empty-handed, his gray jacket and white shirt getting wet, hair sticking to his forehead. He knows it’s a mistake by the expression on Shinsuke’s face. It occurs to him that he knows that expression, the one between anger and confusion, which then causes more anger, and the cycle repeats, and he remembers how as a boy he was always so full of madness, emptiness—

“What the hell, Zura?” Shinsuke says.

_What the hell, Zura? Shinsuke says._

_What—_

_What did you do?_

_Split, split open, What the hell, Zura? Open-throat man._

_I thought_

_What did you do?_

And at the time when Shinsuke was a boy full of anger always and Katsura was a boy full of fear always and they talked, and Shinsuke talked to him, and thought they thought they could do something about or at least Katsura thought because he tried and he knew that if he could just start over but start over? remember everything you don’t have. Shinsuke had nothing. Shinsuke had everything but nothing. Katsura thought he had nothing but he didn’t know just how much nothing, until she ran away and it was not right.

And it was the only way out. He was so sure.

I was so sure, he says. Shinsuke looks at his hands like he can see the blood dripping, although he can’t, because Katsura washed his hands very clean. He made sure.

Well—what did you do with the—

He’s still there, at the house.

Was it, did he try to—

He was asleep in his bed.

What the hell, Zura? He looks devastated.

Where’s all your anger gone, Shinsuke? Where is it when I need it?

Shinsuke looks at him very strangely, then. Just seconds ago he was shaking with confusion or rage or whatever, and now his face is just blank. You need it? he says.

And from there, he isn’t sure what happens, but Shinsuke is saying, Go. Go back to school. His eyes have a very particular glow, like blue death.

He can hear people saying, poor boy. Such a good boy too.

And from there—

Elizabeth is there behind Shinsuke. He supposes that she got the message. Shinsuke doesn’t seem to have noticed her.

-

 So Zura remembers it now, Shinsuke thinks. Which means that he didn’t before. He had forgotten. How?

But Shinsuke has seen stranger things happen to people’s minds. So wrigglingly, clawingly dark it can be, he knows from experience. He looks at Zura’s wet face with new eyes. He looks so normal with his light brown jacket and cheap shirt and neat black hair. Just a little wet, but normal people get wet in the rain. He is marveling at it still when something hard and bruising crashes into his wrists.

 His cheeks are so cold already that the dirty puddles feel warm, splashing against them. A voice, full of some repressed emotion, throwing words over his head. He is bleeding somewhere. His whole body is so cold it must be dead, somewhere. Then Zura appears in his vision, tilted and shaking, getting closer.

 “Shinsuke,” he says in his funny, grave voice. Funny because it’s so grave. He wishes he could see Zura’s face but it’s in a weird angle, not to mention that black water keeps leaking into his eyes from the sky.

 “I’m going to call for backup,” says the voice. “Keep an eye on him.”

 “Alright,” Zura nods. “Thanks, Elizabeth.”

 Shinsuke is aware that he is breathing. His shoulder aches from being thrown into the asphalt, and his throat is throbbing like something is stuck inside, like maybe water, drowning. Then Zura’s face gets closer.

 “Shinsuke,” he says. It sounds like he is whispering. “I remember everything now.”

 Shinsuke looks at him. Suddenly he finds that he has nothing to say.

 “I,” Zura hesitates. He wipes a hand down his face. “I’m going to confess.”

 Shinsuke says nothing. All these years chasing him, Zura thought that it was Shinsuke who killed his stepfather? Well, he’s seen stranger things happen. Seen a girl who dreamt up a whole beautiful boy inside her head, a whole beautiful mangled death of that boy, and didn’t know she was mad. Seen a man crawling and crying like a child, a lover who shot herself, a singer cutting his own throat. So this is not so strange, that Zura had forgotten. Hair keeps getting in Zura’s eyes and he keeps pushing it back.

 The voice, the woman, his partner, calls Zura and says that someone is on the way. Zura nods at her. Then he turns back to Shinsuke. He doesn’t seem to find it odd that Shinsuke is saying nothing. Seems to take it for surrender, because he says, still in his funny grave voice, “Well, Shinsuke. It’s time you paid for what you’ve done.”

 Shinsuke closes his eyes. Lights overwhelm him.

 It occurs to him that he is kind of tired. It’s probably sleep deprivation. The lights are red and blue and wet. Then it’s the stale, suffocating warmth of some inside, then voices… meaningless voices. It’s probably sleep deprivation. He hasn’t had a night’s full ever since that girl blew her brains out and left herself sprawled, like that, in front of him. She wanted him to know something. Her last words were—well, they must have been something meaningful. Because she wanted him to know something. But she was so focused on it being dramatic or got impatient or slipped or got her infinity mixed up for a second so that she was pulling the trigger just as she was speaking—Shinsuke never heard what it was she said.

 Then it is cold again, inside again but somewhere cold, hard. Dark. Small. Occasionally he is taken out. They ask him questions. They bluff and say they have proofs of everything. Shinsuke knows they’re bluffing the same way he knows heights, broken concrete, mud-rain, some gothic foreign castle where murder failed to take place. But the lights are so bright here. He closes his eyes. The voices continue, harsh and then calm and then trembling and then flat. The same way he knows that he could get himself out of this, if he really tried. Matako and Takechi didn’t want him to come—they must know by now, it must have been on television or something. They’ll come for him if they can, if it’s not too inconvenient for them. Shinsuke guesses that at least a couple of days have passed, but he is sort of numb, and it might have been a year, or ten, and then the decision to quit isn’t so hard as he thought. There are limits, he thinks—accepting defeat, only a little bitter. Once he thought he could go beyond all that. But no matter how godly you feel, you get your lungs and eyeballs crushed anyway, down that deep. And then there are all those deep-sea fish with their white glowing eyeballs and mouths slowly splitting open with their million tiny teeth for pieces of you. That’s what he’s learned.

Slowly he opens his eyes and it’s that girl who is looking at him across the gray grainy table, the cheap black pen in her fist almost crushed for how hard she is gripping it. She is looking at Shinsuke like she knows him from her dreams. A few seconds pass, or maybe it’s longer. The girl crumples up her face, thinking he isn’t going to answer. Her mouth opens.

 “Yes,” Shinsuke says. “Yes, Elizabeth.”

 She looks like she wants to ask him how he knows her name. “Yes, as in—”

 “Yes, everything you said.”

 She stops talking for a minute. Or a second? Says something strange—“I didn’t know you were listening. Or that you could talk.”

 This amuses him. Slowly he smiles.

 “Well, then, just to—you know, make sure—” She drops her eyes down to the paper on the table and starts reading off, once again, the summary of his life in bullet-points. They are quite various and it takes a long time. After each item she looks up and waits for him to acknowledge it. When he does, she marks a tiny check and moves on to the next. From this angle upside down, the checkmarks look like a drawing of a spine. Luminous, almost, against the blood-boiling darkness all around. Final item, she says.

 “Final item. The murder of—” she looks up.

And Shinsuke is suddenly awake. Like someone’s put a hole through his balloon-brain. Like pulling the skin out from under your feet. An unpleasant spark going through his brain, whole body, skin rustling against the coarse prison garments. The murder of—

 “The murder of Katsura Kotarou’s stepfather.”

 She seems curious, watching him. Shinsuke realizes he’s sat up, leaning forward on the desk, like he is—as if he is—slowly, he leans back. He watches her curious eyes and thinks how best to answer (but didn’t he say he was going to confess? I remember everything now, that’s what he said. I’m going to confess. That’s what he said).

 There is a plastic water bottle on the table in front of him. He’s never noticed it until now. The water has the lights, table, paper, her ringed finger, everything eaten and digested, distorted in twisting suggestions of light and dark.

 “How many days have passed?” he says.

 “A week.”

 Well, he thinks. Well, Zura.

 “Well?” Elizabeth sounds impatient, but her eyes are still curious. Eyes he knows well. People are always curious. I’ve been waiting all my life. I never lived until you. Some slowly smile. It’s like they think he is the mysterious embodiment of their deepest, darkest secrets. One minute you think you know what insane is, until you meet a new freak who keeps bloods in glass jars and wants a piece of your heart and scream, scream, it’s your fault. The murder of Katsura Kotarou’s stepfather, that murderer.

 “I don’t remember,” Shinsuke says.

 “You don’t remember?”

 “I don’t remember.”

 She remains silent for some time, judging this lie. Intensely, desperately curious. He watches her watching him. Finally, she puts her pen down on the paper and reaches out for the water bottle, screws it open. Gulps down half of it at one breath. When she is done she offers it to him. Shinsuke takes it slowly and continues in the same motion to pour it out onto the floor, every last drop. They both watch the puddle for a while.

 “Fine,” she finally says. “We have more than enough to charge you with anyway.” And that’s it.

-

 The dance resumes. Lights, absences of, attacks of, cold growing colder every day (he assumes they are days), thoughts running in circles, curious eyes. Once he sees a man who looks like his dead uncle. He has dreams of killing him, going back in time to do it too, and when he wakes up he remembers how Zura’s eyes grew wild and frightening, looking at something behind his back. When he looked there was nothing. Then he starts believing in ghosts, and in his dead uncle. Meanwhile time doesn’t seem to go backward and he is moved, moved out, then in. A brief touch of air on his skin tells him that he is outside, then the steady, mechanic sound of the heater tells him he is inside again. Heater, engine, machine. He is in a car. Somebody’s taking him somewhere in a car.

 They’re having a nice journey, quiet and warm and asphyxiating, and Shinsuke is having pleasant thoughts for once about the ocean and blood on his hands, when the car suddenly stops.

 “What the hell?” the guy who was watching him says, and gets up about halfway. Shinsuke wants to tell him that’s not such a good idea. The driver turns back, to say something, and then slumps forward. Can’t tell if he’s dead. The guy at the back with him is panicking by now (he’s very young) and trying to open the door at the back and reach out to the driver at the same time. Matako and Takechi, he thinks. Glass breaks somewhere, or at least there’s a sound like it, and the guy is heaped like dirty clothes in front of his feet. There is shaking, or there has been, and maybe it is now that the driver slumps forward. He isn’t so sure. Anyway the van’s door is standing open. It’s very cold outside, no wind but the air sharp and violent, going straight through his white bones and filling the small spaces inside his brain. He is awake.

 The open doors seem inviting. He steps outside. Doesn’t forget to relieve the confused, unconscious young man of his weapon.

 He can hear the last of the autumn insects in between sparse grass, and the outlines of trees as throbbing lines like heartbeats. He turns around and shuts the van’s door to stop the light and see better. When he turns around, there is someone standing a little away from him, watching him. Or so he thinks—can’t see his face because of the mask he is wearing. Nothing so sinister, not even close (scratched-out eyes, beaks with cracks, bleeding clowns, you should see what he’s seen). In fact, it just seems to be a black ski mask. But because he’s been thinking about ghosts for days, he wonders, for a moment. Then gathers himself. And calls, “Takechi?”

 The mask does not answer. He—at least he can tell it’s a _he_ —doesn’t seem to be carrying any guns or anything. The mask makes a motion with his head, as if to say _follow me_ , and starts walking away. Well—this is odd. Oceans and blood on his hands. Now a ghost, dumb, bidding him follow. Shinsuke hesitates for a moment but decides to go with it, since it seems to be his part to play. He has a gun, anyway. A gust of wind sends shivers straight through his bones but it’s just a sensation, can’t touch him.

 They walk for some time, though by now Shinsuke is hesitant to use that word, _time,_ not sure what it is. Anyway, they move through space, he can tell that, so they must have moved in time too in one way or another. Then the man stops, suddenly, and turns to face him. A new scene must have begun when he wasn’t paying attention. Shinsuke has one hand loosely on the metallic thing tucked inside his pocket, and the other hand shaking uncontrollably. Suddenly, he has an idea who this might be.

 No, he thinks. He doesn’t want it to be. He doesn’t want it so badly that it shocks him. It’s a pure sort of shock, untarnished by anything, it’s so alien. No, no.

 But the mask comes off. Slowly, as far as he can tell (which isn’t much), and there he is, Zura—calm as anything.

Katsura, his best friend.

 “Takasugi,” he said.

“Takasugi,” he called him, until one day it was “Shinsuke.” Like “Shinsuke,” his uncle used to call him. His dead uncle.

 Katsura, a strange person. Smart and focused and just so—good. Good at school, good at listening, good at being calm and collected and nice to girls and guys and teachers and people at the shops and cleaning ladies and even Shinsuke. Always so neat and careful, though he didn’t seem to own that many shirts. Or pens. Or winter coats.

 And there _he_ was, with his designer shirt—there he was walking along the train track like a tight-rope walker, totally concentrating on it, hearing nothing outside his needle vision. Just alive enough to notice, perhaps, that the sky was a ridiculously pretty shade of pastel blue that day. Clear, cold, and endless. There he was walking, concentrating on staying on the right path, not thinking about having killed his uncle. Not thinking, because not true. Well—not technically. And then a sharp breeze, because it was the last dying days of autumn and the trees were already bare like limbs, and it almost toppled him over—he fumbled, he clawed the air, and almost got the balance back, and then was—snatched.

 Not wind this time. Hands—human hands. Digging into his ribs in a way that must have been painful, were he not too dumb and surprised to feel it. Gravel crunches beneath his feet and he is shoved, shoved, until he crashes his ass on the grassy slope, and a giant thing speeds by in front of his eyes.

 The hands let him go only after the train has completely disappeared from view. Shinsuke thinks to look, then. Someone saved his life? For what? It’s so strange that he stares for a long time. Katsura stares back at him for longer.

Shinsuke doesn’t know what he expects, but what Katsura asks him next definitely isn’t one of the things he would have thought—imagined—well, normal. Under the circumstances.

“Did you do your math homework?”

 “What?”

 Shinsuke is aware of the dead-to-murdering spectrum his face is capable of, but Katsura doesn’t seem daunted at all.

 “Because the last question is giving me a little trouble. It’s not what we covered in class. I thought you might—”

 “What?”

 “Well, you’re good at math, aren’t you?” And then he said, “By the way, do you mind if I call you Shinsuke?”

 “Yes, no, I—”

 Thought you were going to confess. He isn’t sure if he says it out loud. Zura is looking at him with that inscrutable look of his, black hair ruffled by the mask and the wind. He must have said _something_ , though, because the situation has now escalated.

 Blood on your hands. Blood on your face, your neck. What the hell, Zura? What did you do? And then he said, calm as anything, I killed my father.

 “Stepfather,” Shinsuke corrects, automatically, because that’s what Zura always did.

 “I thought he was going to—”

 “What did you do?”

 Zura frowns a little as if to indicate confusion, though on the whole he looks very calm. Sometimes he is like death, Shinsuke thinks. Still water, cold, very deep. A large lake at night, so black you can taste it. “I told you, I—”

 “No, I mean—”

 “I was so sure,” Zura says, looking down at his hands. They are clean. They are the only part of him that is clean. Shinsuke worries about the route he’s taken to get here. Did he pass any traffic cameras? Did anyone see him? Did they smell the blood? Well, if you were sure. Well—

 “I mean, what did you do with the body?”

 Zura looks up at him. “He’s still there, inside the house.”

 It’s too bright here, under the yellow streetlamp, if he can still see all the blood. Shinsuke takes his arm and pulls him into the shadows. Zura comes, limp like a doll. But now that he can’t really see his face it’s worse. Shinsuke feels himself starting to sweat.

 “Was it, I mean, did he try to—” he stutters, hardly knowing what he’s asking. He’s just trying to get the picture right, that’s all, because he’s having a hard time seeing it. Zura with a—knife? All that blood, can’t have been a gun, right? Though he doesn’t know, not really, except for the stuff he’s seen on TV. He’s never even realized that blood could smell like that.

 Zura looks at him and it’s almost like he is pitying him. No, it’s just, he’s so calm. At least he looks it. And Shinsuke is falling to pieces in front of him because—because—

 “He was asleep in his bed.”

 Okay, now he can see a little better. Scene: wicked stepfather asleep in his bed. Desperate stepson approaching him with—but what did his eyes look like? How did he hold his knife/gun/spear/machete/whatever? Shinsuke tries to figure it out but all he sees of Zura’s eyes in the dark are two bright watery lights.

 “What the hell, Zura?” He is close to crying. His whole body shaking. It’s too much, he thinks. Also it’s too strange, it’s unbelievable. 

 But what he said next. When Zura says, in his broken-guitar voice, “Where’s all your anger gone, Shinsuke?”

Anger? Where has it gone? What anger?

“Where is it when I need it?”

 That’s when it all changed, Shinsuke can see now. The scene has escalated into a standoff now, but he missed the transition. Zura, taller, older, still looks at him with those watery bright lights. But that is about it, as far as the comparison goes. Zura looks to him now completely cracked. Cracked, that’s the word. He remembers the years running from him, his creator, hating and needing—something. Creator? Yes, yes, Zura made him who he is. From then he has never been the same, how could he, having stared into the eyes of the open-throat man? All he could do to keep his eyes open. To run. So maybe that’s where the transition happens? He is the forsaken creature, the monster. This is where he kills his god and consummates his crimes.

 But Katsura, his friend. He was so beautiful. It breaks his heart, really, if that doesn’t sound too commonplace.

-

 “Shinsuke, you’re so smart,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone so smart. Why don’t you do something with your life?”

 Like what?

 “I don’t know. Anything you want.”

 He was the one who said it’s not your fault. He was the only one. He was the one who asked him if he had lunch yet (usually no) and if he did his homework (almost never) and why he liked classical music (because it rhymes). He was so good, everyone said so. Everyone wondered at how good a boy he was, and why he was friends with someone like Shinsuke—that scary, troubled kid. Rich parents, spoiled, bored with life, twisted somewhere. But that wasn’t true. Shinsuke was never bored with life, just scared of it. It seemed too weird, too incomprehensible, the longer he watched. Because a boy like Katsura did not deserve the things he had to endure. Shinsuke didn’t know much, but he knew that. For all that, life was frightening. For the broken glass. The tattered winter coat. The bruises. The pastel sky too far away to be real.

 He stares at Zura. He was shaking just seconds ago, but now he is very still. It’s like he’s broken something, a clock or a mirror or something, and things begin to look very different. “You need it?” And that was the moment.

 Zura’s face cracks for the first time. His lips loosen, his whole face falls, and when he drops his head Shinsuke decides to take that for a yes. It fills him with unthinkable light. It’s like he’s seen the sun for the first time, after traveling years and years up from the deep dark sea.

 “Go,” he says. “Go back to school.” He starts to work it out in his head. How to get to Zura’s house without being seen—how to convince them that it was him—how to keep Zura safe. All the time he is running these thoughts there is a loud voice in his head that keeps saying, Save him. I’m going to save him. And from then—

-

 “You’re broken,” says Shinsuke. Zura is looking at the gun and not moving. He doesn’t even deny it. Anyone can see, though, with his face in pieces like that. He didn’t get how Zura could have forgotten. All this time, he realizes, he was trying to understand. How? How? But now he gets it. If he never remembered him at all it would’ve been better, perhaps (no?). No, no doubt about it. But it’s not like he can cut that memory out of him with a knife.

 Shinsuke takes a step closer. “Why didn’t you confess? Why did you break me out?” Thinking he knows the answer. Feeling his heart break, as if it’s some sugar-crusted thing. “I have to kill you now. Because—”

 Zura listens to his reasons like he used to listen to his teachers. He doesn’t say anything, which is making Shinsuke a little crazy. His fingers feel broken and useless. He is so close now that he could touch him if he just reached out with his hand. Or touch him with the metal barrel of his gun. Either way, close.

 His heartbeats, his breathing, too loud and too alive. The wind has died and the crickets have stopped and it’s like the whole world is waiting. Not with excitement, not with curiosity, for they know how it ends. There is only one ending. He feels like how the sinner son must have felt, with a mother’s brooch in his hands, the last thing he was going to see. It’s odd and frightening, and very sad. He is thinking, what have I been doing, trying to fight it?

 And then Zura opens his mouth to mumble something. Blood rushing in his ears, hands shaking, Shinsuke doesn’t hear it clearly. It’s a question—that much he can tell.

Shinsuke leans in closer. “What?” And doesn’t know why, but thinks in that moment of the girl. Right before she blew out her brains she was going to say something. It was something very important that he had to know, about life of which he was so scared, about death of which he knew nothing. Something that she had known from the beginning. That’s what she told him, anyway. She was a poet. She was crazy but she never said a dishonest thing in her whole life. It must have been a very important truth, for her to have shot herself.

 Zura looks up and says it again.

 “What?” Shinsuke says, hearing it as if through water. “What do you mean, I’m laughing?”

-

 Yes, I can see, Katsura thinks. This is very funny. The whole thing, with his forgetting and remembering and drowning. But the forgetting, that’s the funniest of all. Especially now that he can see everything so clearly—how Shinsuke had looked when he was a boy. He hasn’t changed very much, not like Katsura. He still looks young and dangerous and beautiful. He remembers the first time he talked to him, when he saw him walking on the train tracks. A cold, devastating day it was. The sky so achingly large, the air so transparent. He saw Shinsuke walking—with his hair flying, eyes focused, legs shaking—and thought he looked like a god. And then the train was coming—


End file.
